Jane Hirshfield

It is, of course, we who house poems as much as their words, and we ourselves must be the locus of poetry's depth of newness. Still, the permeability seems to travel both ways: a changed self will find new meanings in a good poem, but a good poem also changes the shape of the self.

In a room with many windowssome thoughts slide past uncatchable, ghostly.

Perimeter is not meaning, but it changes meaning,/as wit increases distance, and compassion erodes it.

Standing DeerAs the house of a personin age sometimes grows clutteredwith what istoo loved or too heavy to part with,the heart may grow cluttered.And still the house will be emptied,and still the heart.As the thoughts of a personin age sometimes grow sparer,like the great cleanness come into a room, the soul may grow sparer;one sparrow song carves it completely.And still the room is full,and still the heart.Empty and filled,like the curling half-light of morning,in which everything is still possible and so why not.Filled and empty,like the curling half-light of evening,in which everything now is finished and so why not.Beloved, what can be, what was,will be taken from us.I have disappointed.I am sorry. I knew no better.A root seeks water.Tenderness only breaks open the earth.This morning, out the window,the deer stood like a blessing, then vanished.

Age in itself gives substance _ what has lasted becomes a thing worth keeping. An older poem's increasing strangeness of language is part of its beauty, in the same way that the cracks and darkening of an old painting become part of its luminosity in the viewer__ mind.

To plunge one thing into the shape or nature of another is a fundamental gesture of creative insight, part of how we make for ourselves a world more expansive, deft, fertile, and startling in richness.

The heat of autumn is different from the heat of summer. One ripens apples, the other turns them to c

The heart's actionsare neither the sentence nor its reprieve. Salt hay and thistles, above the cold granite. One bird singing back to another because it can't not.

One way poetry connects is across time. . . . Some echo of a writer's physical experience comes into us when we read her poem.

Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.

as some strings, untouched,sound when no one is speaking.So it was when love slipped inside us.

One breath taken completely; one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.

Hope is the hardest love we carry.

TreeIt is foolishto let a young redwoodgrow next to a house.Even in this one lifetime,you will have to choose.That great calm being,this clutter of soup pots and books--Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.

Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.